by Tiffany Sala
“I won’t make you face her this afternoon,” Lucas said. “I’m not going to be able to protect you if she decides to go for your eyes today. Come with me.”
I followed him down an aisle at one end of the store where some particularly exuberant advertising on the window announcing an upcoming sale eliminated any possibility of someone seeing through the glass. A small selection of Christmas decorations were on display there, as well as rows and rows of Love word decorations.
“See!” I said with triumph. “Even the low-class masses can’t take that trash!”
“Quiet,” said Lucas, low-voiced. There was a giggle a few aisles down: his friends had entered the store.
“I’ve been looking for a nice scented candle to put in my bedroom,” a loud voice rose over the murmur in the store. Petra.
I glanced at Lucas, and realised I was heaving with a stifled giggle of my own. There was just something about hiding back there with a slightly damaged but still cute boy while his friends prowled the area that was sending me. I was pretty sure that something was ‘Calista has finally lost her fucking mind’, but I had to work with what I had.
“Lucas,” I whispered. “You haven’t become ugly.”
One side of his mouth lifted. It wasn’t that big grin I so enjoyed, but I didn’t think I could handle his perfect teeth—no doubt the pride of his perfect dentist father—at the moment.
“I’m not vain, either.”
“Oh, I’m not letting go of that one,” I said. “You are fucking vain, Lucas, but I hope you never change. It scares the shit out of me, but I like you just as you are.”
“You’re too loud,” Lucas whispered, and his good arm came towards me, drawing me into him; he kissed me in a way he never had before, a way nobody ever had before. I was willing to stand by my allegation that the method hadn’t even been invented before that moment. It wasn’t one kiss: it was a kiss leading into a kiss leading into another kiss. It seemed unfair somehow, a complete overwhelming of my senses.
When he pulled away from me, Petra and the others were gone. I was half-surprised the whole universe wasn’t gone too. The loudest thing I could hear was my own breathing. I couldn’t work out how I had let him do that to me… then I realised, of course, I had been participating.
“Well,” Lucas said, “that was new for me in a few ways.”
“For me too,” I said.
“I couldn’t stop thinking about you,” Lucas said, his voice still low. Intimate. “In the hospital, I mean. On the way there.”
“So Lucy was telling me.”
“I’ve never met anyone like you,” he told me. “You’re not like—”
I winced. “Not like other girls, Lucas? Really?”
“Not to me,” he said, which was supposed to be a meaningful clarification clearly. “Everything could be different for us, Callie. We could date properly…”
“Properly,” I said, “what does that even mean to you?”
Because Lucas wasn’t like other boys, he didn’t say anything then. He waited to see the worst of what I was going to lay on him.
“I think you thought of me in the hospital because you were scared, and looking for something to distract you,” I told him. “If you’d been able to just go on home, you probably wouldn’t have given me another moment of your time that night.” I snorted. “Maybe you would have cruised around the next morning just to see if I might have been still out and about.”
“I do think my feelings about you have changed,” Lucas countered.
Well, this was what I had wanted, what I’d been trying to achieve before Lucas’s accident. The thing was, I had been wrong. Lucas loving me would not save me the way I had hoped. He was too closed and unpredictable in character for me to even know what his love would do for me. The real solution had been standing up for myself, refusing to let him play with me however he liked… and I had just ruined that strategy by getting tangled up with him again.
I’d hoped to make Lucas fall in love with me… and maybe I’d screwed myself over with such a deceptive strategy, and was starting to fall in love with him myself. And given how little we really knew one another, that was just messed-up.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I feel like I’m the one who’s led you on now, letting you come out with me here, fix my car… but that was never my intention. I don’t really know how I got into this situation, but all I ever wanted to do was clear the air. I can’t take the stress of trying for anything else, not knowing how it would turn out with you… I’m so sorry.”
“Hey,” Lucas said, “it’s fine. Not holding out for you or any other bitch to make my life better, you know?” I flinched as he reached for the schoolbag still on my back, unzipping the pocket where I kept my phone and pulling it out to check the lock screen. I felt my face heating up, having that phone he’d bought between the two of us. “Well, if we start walking back slowly I reckon by the time we get to Rob’s that kid of his will have your car ready to go. Rob was really going to put the fear of God into him, sounds like.”
“Sure.” We walked out of the store together, him shadowing me. He didn’t have much to say for once, and I was screaming at myself. Wasn’t this what I’d always wanted? Why was it, every time he actually turned towards me, I sent him away? Was I making an even bigger mistake than I had the first time?
I could find out for sure if I took the risk, made the leap. But the way it worked with Lucas, the best of feelings seemed to go along with the worst. If I tried to claim everything, it might really kill me.
This was the best decision.
When we made it back to Rob’s garage, my pink car was ready for me as Lucas had predicted, now with the marks of my classmates’ utter disapproval of my attempt to rise above my station sprayed and beaten clear. Lucas rolled his eyes a little like he wasn’t impressed with the quality of the work—there was some unevenness in the paint job to be sure—but he paid Rob what was asked and made some attempt at a gracious remark when he commented that he and his people probably weren’t used to having to work on a car like that.
He didn’t have much to say when I dropped him off at home, either, trying not to peer up at the utter mansion whose wide driveway he slouched his way up.
Sitting in my car waiting to be sure he got inside safely, I started wondering if I’d really hurt him, if he cared more about me than he’d wanted to let on… then I realised that was very likely what he wanted me to be wondering. And even if he didn’t, it was a bad sign that I was thinking that way. I couldn’t imagine being in a relationship with someone and having it constantly under that much stress. It couldn’t possibly end well for either of us.
I didn’t call out to him and announce I’d changed my mind, like I’d wanted to for just a moment. I drove back home with a reasonably new-looking car and a reasonably peaceful heart. Honestly, once he got back to having nothing to do with me and all the current excitement settled down, I could probably spend the rest of my last year of school hardly thinking about him. He would be just a narrowly-dodged accident to tell my children about some day, if they ever needed to be convinced their mother had a bit of life in her once. I wasn’t going to end up like my parents, with no way to prove I’d ever been more than a sad adult whose idea of a fun evening was the premiere of the latest trashy reality show.
Chapter Seventeen
The first sign of danger was when I quit my job on Monday.
I didn’t know I was going to do it until I got into the building and Dane was in front of me, asking how things were going, and my mouth started moving without my knowing what was going to come out.
“I need to give you my notice.” Once it was out, my overwhelming feeling was of relief… and awkwardness. “Um… I haven’t actually written anything up yet, but…”
Dane was so taken aback he actually took a step back, as if he needed to take me in more fully to make sense of this.
“I always thought you were keen to do this work long-term, Callie,” he said. �
�That’s the reason I took you on at seventeen, with no qualifications.”
I didn’t think it was just Lucas having made me sensitive to my work situation that had me seeing the barb in that. “I think I always did the work to an acceptable standard, so why even bring that up now?”
Dane didn’t have an answer.
“There’s no point in us fighting,” I said. “But it has to be said that in all the time I’ve worked for you, I haven’t gotten any pay increase, even though you started me off low because you had to train me up first. You haven’t really given me any opportunities to learn about the business of managing as a whole, even though I’m essentially keeping your business running… I just have to sit near the front window and do your numbers all the time. And I have a few questions these days about exactly why I need to sit where everybody coming in and out and near will see me.”
“This is all because of that new boyfriend of yours,” Dane said. “He’s been putting ideas in your head.”
“I do have a few ideas that got in there all by themselves, Dane,” I snapped.
He put his hands up. “Like you said, Callie, let’s not fight about this. If you want this to be the first day of your notice period, that’s fine with me… but I’m going to give you an opportunity to go back on that at any point before the weekend. I’m not so old I can’t remember being a kid and making some rash decisions now and then.”
What rash decision did Dane think I was making here? I’d thought my justification for leaving was as solid as any employee could give.
“I’d better get to work,” I told him. “I’m not going to leave your paperwork in a mess, at least.”
Dane grunted, and retreated to his back-room bunker, leaving me alone for virtually the whole time I was there that day.
He barely looked up when I peeked in and told him I was leaving at the end of my usual hours, but I wasn’t going to bother calling him out on that either. I just gathered up my stuff and left.
It wasn’t on my way home, but a short while later I found myself driving by the mall Lucas had taken me to when he’d bought me my new phone. I parked and strolled in, and though I didn’t let myself consciously admit I had a goal at any point on the journey there, of course I ended up entering the ridiculously glitzy phone store. And I even walked right to the back, where the expensive products were lined up with far too much space between them like they were celebrities.
And then the girl who had recommended my phone to me was standing in front of me.
“I seem to remember we’ve met before recently,” she said. Now that I wasn’t distracted worrying about what Lucas was doing next to me, I could take in her name badge: Amanda. I felt like she was taking in a lot of things about me as she stood there, apparently only mildly looking in my eyes.
I wasn’t fooled. This girl was someone who had managed to hold her own with Lucas once… and if there wasn’t any more to know about their relationship that I didn’t have yet, she was someone I could learn from. And not just about how to deal with the likes of Lucas, because hopefully that wasn’t going to be an issue any more.
“Um,” I started, rather gracefully. “I… I noticed there’s a sign outside saying you’re looking for a new shop assistant.” I didn’t consciously remember taking that in, either. My body seemed to be just going with the flow at the moment, entirely without my input.
“Yes,” Amanda said, “just an entry-level position really, nothing complicated. Are you looking to apply?”
“I don’t have a résumé ready,” I said, feeling very awkward in my barely-public-facing usual work clothes.
“Oh, that’s fine,” Amanda said, “like I told you, it’s entry-level, perfect for a graduate really.” I squirmed, even though I wasn’t even in my school uniform this time around.
Amanda glanced behind her at something. I realised the store was almost empty, and I was going to ask if I’d come in just as they were about to close, when Amanda returned her attention to me. “Actually, my manager is in at the moment, if you’d like to interview. We really aren’t interested in some polished performance and reference checks, we’d like to see what you can do when you’re under pressure a bit. Especially with the more expensive stock, you know, you’ll have people who come in and try all sorts of things to get you to give them a discount you don’t need to or throw in some extras, and you can’t afford that in this job. You’ve got to be able to cope with a lot of, well, shit being thrown your way.”
I’d been about to squirm my way out of the possibility of an interview, but that wording made me pause. Who were they going to interview who was more experienced at having shit thrown their way?
“You know what,” I said, “that sounds like a great idea.”
Thirty minutes later, I had the job.
It was a few weeks after my start date before I was able to find out whether Amanda had further contact with Lucas after our phone-purchasing expedition.
We were straightening all the merchandise in the cases after closing—somehow Amanda could see fractional misalignments in the phones that were beyond my powers of perception and would insist we adjust each of them personally—when she made some remark I wasn’t paying too much conscious attention to, until she said the words your boyfriend.
I nearly dropped a Samsung loose in the case, saving it by the skin of my fingertips. Amanda was an easygoing supervisor, but the gloves were off for anyone who clattered the display devices. Excessive scuffs or scratches made it impossible to sell them as like-new floor stock, and cutting down on your margins was the pinnacle of failure in this business. Not a lot of things scared me these days, but Amanda’s attention to detail scared me. If I could become like her one day, there was no man or woman on the planet who would look down on me.
“Boyfriend?” I made my voice sound confused even though I knew exactly who she was talking about, of course.
“That one you came in with to buy your phone,” said Amanda.
“He’s not my boyfriend,” I told her. “I don’t see him any more, actually.”
I was expecting some sort of big twenty-questions scene where I had to account for having nothing to do with a guy who had bought me an absurdly extravagant gift only weeks before, but Amanda just nodded. “A man like that is hard to keep, isn’t that right?”
Usually, I was nervously respectful of Amanda while we were working together, because I still felt pretty much like a messy schoolgirl playing offsider to an experienced woman half the time. But the vibe was a little different when it was just us two there, with no customers in sight.
“Do you know anything about that?” I asked. “I mean, personally.”
Amanda turned her back to me and started going through a case I was pretty sure we’d taken care of first, because we always did all the cases in the same order every closing. “I do, yes. Got tangled up with a man who broke me to pieces, then insisted on putting the pieces back together in an order of his own choosing.”
I wished there was somewhere in the area to sit down that wouldn’t get me told off. I felt like I couldn’t listen to what Amanda had to say as carefully as I needed to and do absolutely anything else, not even standing on my own two feet. “And what happened, in the end?”
Amanda shrugged. “I married him.”
My eyes did a shocked little dart over to her hand, her completely empty fingers.
“Oh, he’s not the sort of man who has money to throw around on jewels.” She smiled, as if she was instead telling me about her boyfriend who gave her every jewel there was to be had in the world. “At least, not any more.”
Amanda had a story of her own, and realising that seemed to make everything different. “Was it hard?” I asked her.
“To manage a man as strong-willed and destructive as a bull?” Amanda’s smile was soft. I wondered if people had seen me look like that when I was talking about Lucas, if it was why nobody ever believed me when I insisted nothing was going on, that nothing ever had been going on. “Ther
e are some of us who are very good at that particular work, Callie. Isn’t that right?”
I didn’t feel quite confident enough to suggest I fitted in a category alongside Amanda, even if that was what she was suggesting. I turned to another detail, something that would probably seem small to her but was everything to me. “Well I suppose if you have a husband, then Lucas was wrong about you trying to call him after.”
I surprised a laugh out of her. “Is that what he claimed happened?”
“Well, he predicted it,” I said. “The whole thing, he thought was you trying to set up to have him ready to proposition you later.”
“I wouldn’t do that,” Amanda said. “All he got was a really cracking discount because he reminded me of someone I have a soft spot for.” I had wondered about that. “It’s not that I respect boundaries either, but when you’re someone like me, you learn very quickly that you don’t get in the path of a boy like that if you don’t absolutely have to. Whether or not there’s another girl involved.”
One advantage of my new job was being able to skip Mum’s questionable microwave dinners—the socialising more than the dinner, even. I didn’t think Mum was ever going to forgive me for failing with Lucas, but she didn’t feel like she could be honest about her reasons so it was this relentless indirect nonsense. And Dad just sent more of the same in her direction to show his displeasure, the result being one big exhausting mess. Honestly, those two wasted so much energy not really getting along that could have been better spent doing almost anything else with their lives.
The only downside to the new order of things wasn’t a downside at all yet. Mum hated me heating up my own meals outside of dinnertime, so I’d taken to trying out a new fast food outlet each night—or an older favourite.
Amanda and I walked out to our cars together, parting only at the last minute with quick glances back in one another’s directions. You couldn’t be too careful around a place like that.
I was feeling pretty good as I got myself safely locked inside my car and started the engine. I’d sold a few phones that day, and I hadn’t needed to glance over at Amanda for a quick rescue once. I was slowly feeling less and less like that little girl who’d put on my mother’s clothing—assuming a sleeker, more evolved edition of my mother, at least.
